Improved linearity in down-converted analog photonic link by polarization manipulation

A method to improve the linearity of the down-converted analog photonic link is proposed and experimentally demonstrated, consisting of two phase modulators, a polarizer, and an optical filter. Down-conversion of a 10-GHz microwave signal to 100-MHz intermediate frequency is successfully achieved. By carefully optimizing the angles between the transverse-electric and transverse-magnetic modes, the third-order inter-modulation distortion (IMD3) is suppressed. The linearization method leads to a suppression of the IMD3 by more than 14 and 13 dB improvement of spurious-free dynamic range.